Woolf, the “Beta Male” & the confessional essay

A recent article by Jia Tolentino on the feminist blog Jezebel.com titled, “Sheesh, There’s a Reason Women Are ‘Totally Crushing It’ at the Confessional Essay” channels Woolf several times as Tolentino analyzes the future existence of a “new pop-up blog at New York Magazine, a six-week project called Beta Male.”

This new “pop-up blog” will highlight men’s writing, (and presumably, celebrate “beta males”) with a particular interest in the male confessional essay.

The editor of the new blog, Aaron Gell, who is the executive director of Maxim.com, sent out a call for submissions which Leah Finnegan published at Genius.com. Gell calls for men to “demonstrate” that they too can be “introspective” like women writers:

Among the many areas in which women are just totally crushing it lately (sheesh, women!) is the confessional essay. We would like to demonstrate that men can be introspective and self-aware, too. So by all means, whatever you pitch me, try to include a personal essay idea or two. These can be about sex and relationships, family, work, friendships, race, art, beauty, obsession, the body, war, childhood celebrity crushes, parenthood, butt play and/or shoes.

Tolentino alludes to (and links to) Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own several times as she questions the “outlets available for men to confess things about their personal lives online” and the confessional nature of women’s writing. Tolentino writes:

And as we are now in a cultural moment where people are—thankfully—interested in learning about social structures and what life is like for people who have suffered greater hardships, we have, to mixed effect, progressed on the personal essay front from “A Room of One’s Own” into sort of “A Room of One’s Own, Wallpapered With Identity and the Particular Difficult Things It Brings.”